A startling plaudit appeared in last week’s letters section from none other than school-board member David Tokofsky. Tokofsky alleged, “I suspect that the constituents of the 14th [City Council District] are in for a dramatic loss of services and representation if Councilman Alatorre is not there in 1999.”Actually, the rest of us 14th District residents […]
Category: LA Weekly
Cleaning Up Tujunga Wash
Driving up the 210 from the Eastside to Lakeview Terrace, you get that suddenly-I’m-lost anxiety. Just where am I? And just where is this place? The foothills between La Canada and Tujunga Wash seem as grand, vacant and imposing as any mountain range. Thanks to El Nino, they’re still wearing that late Southern California spring […]
Budgetary Beguilement
For nearly a decade, Los Angeles County’s major annual ritual was the week of daylong sessions that comprised the Hall of Administration budget hearings. We all had to plan our lives around them.And then this year, the unimaginable happened: This year, the hearings somehow slipped past almost unnoticed. It felt as though the local course […]
Commissars in the ‘Hood
How much power should neighborhood councils wield in an updated, more responsive city government? Division on that key issue has produced a rift between the two Los Angeles charter commissions and may also signal a break between two major factions of L.A. labor.Although last month the commissions seemed to agree on promoting appointed local councils, […]
Crime Takes a Bite Out of Riordan
To read about it in the Times, the thing might have been the worst local catastrophe since the 1994 quake. On the front page of Saturday’s Metro section, Dick Riordan publicist and occasional Times reporter Jim Newton called a federal decision not to hand the city some law-enforcement money “a stunning slap at Los Angeles’ […]
They’re Off!
So. For the first time in 84 years, we’ve got a real Los Angeles County sheriff’s race. Chief Lee Baca, with 32 percent of the votes cast, will face Sherman Block, whose 36 percent was probably the worst showing at the polls by an incumbent sheriff this century.The only problem is, the surviving candidates from […]
Rev. Callaghan runs wild | L.A. Weekly
It’s gone forever now, but once there was a residential complex as close to paradise as such a place could ever be. Not far from the ocean and adjoining undeveloped hillsides, it had great views, cheap rents, funky old wooden units, lots of trees and shrubs, and a cooperative spirit in which most tenants became […]
Los Angeles’ Shuttered School Yards
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling him (if only […]
Los Angeles’ Shuttered School Yards
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling him (if only […]
Stein-Hubbell affair
Big lies are perfect for people who can’t handle the facts. Since they appeal to the lazy mind, big lies can go far. How easy it is to say that Steven Spielberg wants to build DreamWorks on endangered wetlands – it’s not true, but it carries the validity of myth.Big lies are usually born in […]